The theft of a rifle model from a statue of a soldier on Thirroul's historic World War I memorial has dismayed members of the local RSL.

Clarence House meeting comes after Duke of Sussex expressed hope of a reconciliation with his family in May Prince Harry met King Charles at Clarence House on Wednesday, their first face-to-face meeting for 19 months. The private tea in London, which lasted 54 minutes, comes after the Duke of Sussex publicly expressed hopes of a reconciliation with his family in an interview with the BBC in May. Continue reading...

Study claims Swiss firm provided Nazi concentration camp with anti-frostbite product used in deadly tests in early 1940s The natural cosmetics company Weleda supplied a skin cream to the Dachau concentration camp that went on to be used for human testing, resulting in the agonising deaths of prisoners, a historian specialising in Nazi Germany has claimed. Weleda, founded 104 years ago and known worldwide for its holistic remedies, sourced large quantities of medicinal herbs during the Nazi era from an agricultural plantation overseen by the SS in Dachau, southern Germany, according to a major report by Anne Sudrow commissioned by the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. Continue reading...

Evidence of millions of animal bones at sites in West Country and Surrey points to ‘age of feasting’ These days, revellers converge on the West Country from all parts of the UK and beyond to take part in the wonderful craziness of the Glastonbury festival. It turns out that at the end of the bronze age – also a time of climatic and economic crisis – the same sort of impulse gripped people. Continue reading...

Malthouse, Melbourne Tom Wright’s production is the best thing Malthouse has produced in years: shocking, chilling, funny and often breathtakingly beautiful Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Homer’s Iliad isn’t just a foundational Hellenic text: it’s the great primal myth of war, sacred and eternal. Its gods and mortals alike are monstrous, heroic and pitiful, endlessly iterative and contemporary. We’ve been treading and retreading this same material for almost 3,000 years, not to exorcise violence but to ritualise and sanctify it. Only the Mahabharata can hold a candle to the Iliad’s immensity and continued intellectual relevance. While all that cultural weight is enough to make a modern playwright quake, Tom Wright – whose writing for the stage has encompassed the mythologies of Orestes, Medea and Oedipus, to name only a few – is made of sterner stuff. He launches headlong into the colossal tale with the brio and control of the old masters. While the Iliad is the primary text here, Wright also folds in details from Aeschylus, Euripides and Virgil, as well as inventions of his own. The result is shocking, chilling, funny and often breathtakingly beautiful, a grounded piece of epic theatre that fringes the divine. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Continue reading...

From the plans for a Major Tom movie to the Aladdin Sane mask and some wild ‘artworks’ sent by fans, this Bowie treasure trove is now open to the public – and it’s the freakiest show! In the 1990s, David Bowie started assembling an archive of his own career in earnest. There seems something telling about the timing. It happened on the heels of 1990’s Sound+Vision tour, when Bowie grandly announced he was performing his hits live for the final time – a resolution that lasted all of two years. It also followed the bumpy saga of Tin Machine, the short-lived hard rock band that Bowie insisted he was simply a member of, rather than the star attraction, and whose work has thus far escaped the extensive campaign of posthumous archival Bowie releases. These include more than 25 albums and box sets in the nine years since his death, with another – the 18-piece collection I Can’t Give Everything Away – due this Friday. Having attempted to escape the weight of his past with decidedly mixed results, Bowie seems to have resolved instead to come to some kind of accommodation with it. “I think you’re absolutely right,” says Madeleine Haddon, lead curator at the V&A in London, which is about to open the David Bowie Centre at its East Storehouse, drawn from his archive. “And that capacity for self-reflection was just tremendous.” Continue reading...

Leaked files show former PM made 34 paid appearances in less than two years and reveal details of his disclosures Boris Johnson earned more than £5m from less than two years of paid speeches after standing down as prime minister, leaked files suggest. Transcripts and itineraries demonstrate the globe-trotting nature of the former prime minister’s new life as a public speaker. He made 34 paid appearances between leaving office in September 2022 and May 2024, according to a file in the leak. Continue reading...

Crowe and Malek are hugely watchable but this ultimately fails to deliver an authentic version of events If the Nuremberg trials were political theatre, writer and director James Vanderbilt leans into the spectacle of it. His new movie Nuremberg, about the show put on for the rest of the world to indict Nazi war criminals, is packaged like old-fashioned entertainment. There are movie stars (chiefly Rami Malek and Russell Crowe) with slicked-back hair, trading snappy barbs and self-important monologues in smoky rooms, meanwhile the gravity of the moment tends to be kept at bay. All the bureaucratic and legal speak around fine-tuning an unprecedented process, where one country prosecutes the high command of another, goes down easy in an Aaron Sorkin sort of way. It is riveting when its urgency is defended by an actor as great as Michael Shannon. It is all so watchable, to a fault, especially when dealing with the unspeakable. There’s some rhyme and reason to the director’s approach. Vanderbilt (who wrote the screenplay for David Fincher’s Zodiac, a masterpiece about the impossible pursuit for truth) has made a movie about two figures so narcissistic, opportunistic and caught up in the showmanship that they leave very little room for the gravity of the moment to sink in. Continue reading...

Trees were planted almost 100 years ago at the entrance to a tiny New South Wales town to recognise locals who served in WWI, but residents say a proposed wind farm could "butcher" the living memorial.

The city of Canberra may only be 112 years old, but it has many things worth preserving, like a brick skate park in the south, and pine trees and 1960s flats in the north. But there can be hurdles to recognising and preserving heritage as the city grows.

<p>Painting was spotted online by Dutch journalists when the daughter of a former Nazi official put her house up for sale in Mar del Plata</p><p>There was nothing very remarkable about the middle-aged couple who lived in the low, stone-clad villa on calle Padre Cardiel, a quiet residential street in the leafy Parque Luro district of Argentina’s best-known seaside town, Mar del Plata.</p><p>Patricia Kadgien, 58, was born in Buenos Aires, five hours to the north. Her social media described her as a yoga teacher and practitioner of biodecoding, an obscure alternative therapy that claims to cure illness by resolving past traumas.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/06/18th-century-portrait-stolen-by-nazis-recovered-in-argentina">Continue reading...</a>

<p>From a diplomat who embraced the exiled Albert Einstein to a schoolteacher who helped ‘non-Aryan’ students flee, these remarkable individuals refused to bend the knee to Hitler – only to be dramatically betrayed. What made them risk it all?</p><p>I grew up in a house where nothing German was allowed. No Siemens dishwasher or Krups coffee machine in the kitchen, no Volkswagen, Audi or Mercedes in the driveway. The edict came from my mother. She was not a Holocaust survivor, though she had felt the breath of the Shoah on her neck. She was just eight years old on 27 March 1945, when her own mother was killed by the last German V-2 rocket of the war to fall on London, a bomb that flattened a&nbsp;corner of the East End, killing 134 people, almost all of them Jews. One way or another, the blast radius of that explosion would encompass the rest of my mother’s life and much of mine.</p><p>Of course, she knew that the bomb that fell on Hughes Mansions had not picked out that particular building deliberately. But given that the Nazis were bent on eliminating the Jews of Europe, she also knew how delighted they would have been by the target that fate, or luck, had chosen for that last V-2, how pleased that at 21 minutes past seven on that March morning it had added 120 more to the tally of dead Jews that would, in the end, number 6 million. And so came the rule. No&nbsp;trace of Germany would be allowed to touch our family: no visits, no holidays, no contact. The Germans were a guilty nation, every last one of them implicated in the wickedest crime of the 20th century.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/06/astonishing-story-german-rebels-defied-nazis-jonathan-freedland-the-traitors-circle">Continue reading...</a>

<p>The humanist historian brings objects to life beautifully, but falters when it comes to people and their beliefs</p><p>Domination tells the story of how a tiny local cult became one of the greatest cultural and&nbsp;political forces in history. Alice Roberts puts the case that the Roman empire lived on in a different form in the church.</p><p>It is not an original idea – after all the foundation prayer of Christianity says “thy Kingdom come” – but Roberts tells the story from the point of view of individual parishes and even buildings. It’s a revelation, like watching those stop-motion films of how a plant grows and blooms. There’s a section about how a Roman villa might transform into a parish, the long barn providing the footprint, the web of relationships providing the social connection, the very tiles and columns providing the building materials. I&nbsp;can’t think of anyone who writes better about the way objects can speak&nbsp;to us. There’s a passage here describing her joy on grasping what it means that an ordinary-looking clay lamp found in Carlisle is purple on the inside; there’s a beautiful afterword about the history of bells.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/sep/05/domination-by-alice-roberts-review-a-brilliant-but-cynical-history-of-christianity">Continue reading...</a>

Smithy Zimran died before he could realise his dream of receiving dialysis on country, but his legacy lives on.

<p>In this week’s newsletter: an archaeologist and gamer on why we love to walk around finding objects in-game and in real life</p><p>The game I’m most looking forward to right now is Big Walk, the latest title from House House, creators of the brilliant Untitled Goose Game. A cooperative multiplayer adventure where players are let loose to explore an open world, I’m interested to see what emergent gameplay comes out of it. Could Big Walk allow for a kind of community archaeology with friends? I certainly hope so.</p><p>When games use environmental storytelling in their design – from the positioning of objects to audio recordings or graffiti – they invite players to role play as archaeologists. Game designer Ben Esposito <a href="https://x.com/torahhorse/status/709458086524682241">infamously joked</a> back in 2016 that environmental storytelling is the “art of placing skulls near a toilet” <strong>– </strong>which might have been a jab at the tropes of games like the Fallout series, but his quip demonstrates how archaeological gaming narratives can be. After all, the incongruity of skulls and toilets is likely to lead to many questions and interpretations about the past in that game world, however ridiculous.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/sep/02/pushing-buttons-archaeology-and-games">Continue reading...</a>